Is it
possible for anyone in Germany, nowadays, to raise his right hand, for whatever
the reason, and not be flooded by the memory of a dream to end all dreams?
—Walter Abish, How German Is It? (1980)

And then
I thought that, one day, maybe, there’ld be a human society in a world which is
beautiful, a society which wasn’t just disgust. —Kathy Acker, Empire of the
Senseless (1988)

Dear
mother, —Kathy Acker, Great Expectations (1982)

‘I
closed my eyes, head drooping, like a person drunk for so long she no longer
knows she’s drunk, and then, drunk, awoke to the world which lay before me.’
—Kathy Acker, Don Quixote (1986)

“Oh, my
girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than
this!” —Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)

Then I
lifted the hook and flung the window open….
Spring
came in.
—Felipe
Alfau, Locos (1936)

That was
all long ago in some brief lost spring, in a place that is no more. In that hour
that frogs begin and the scent off the mesquite comes strongest. —Nelson
Algren,A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)

If only
we could start a band and change the world. wouldn’t that be fun? —Mark
Amerika, The Kafka Chronicles (1993)

We’re
away once more over the field. Odilo Unverdorben and his eager heart. And I
within, who came at the wrong time—either too soon or after it was all too late.
—Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow (1991)

Join me,
please, as I look on the bright side. Russia is dying. And I’m glad. —Martin
Amis, House of Meetings (2006)

He
stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out
of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had
become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood. —Sherwood
Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

It’s old
light, and there’s not much of it. But it’s enough to see by. —Margaret Atwood,
Cat’s Eye (1988)

Between
Barton and Delaford there was that constant communication which strong family
affection would naturally dictate; and among the merits and the happiness of
Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that,
though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live
without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their
husbands. —Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)

With the
Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as
Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest
gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the
means of uniting them. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

But, in
spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the
predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were
fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union. —Jane Austen, Emma
(1816)

She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm
for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in
its domestic virtues

than in
its national importance. —Jane Austen, Persuasion (1817)

I came
to the last page just as the train was pulling out. —Paul Auster, The Locked
Room (1986)

We
walked up the stairs together, and once we were inside, I handed him the pages
of this book. —Paul Auster, Leviathan (1992)

“There’ll always be an England,” he told them and ran, laughing, down the steps.
—Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door (1994)

The aircraft rise from the runways of the airport, carrying the remnants of
Vaughan’s semen to the instrument panels and radiator grilles of a thousand
crashing cars, the stances of a million passengers. —J. G. Ballard, Crash
(1973)

And by way of throwing down the glove to Society, Rastignac went to dine with
Mme. de Nucingen. —Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot (1834; trans. Ellen
Marriage)

Go,
my book, and help destroy the world as it is. —Russell
Banks, Continental Drift (1985)

The
story will be over. Except that I continue. —Russell Banks, Affliction
(1989)

He ran
this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying
with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she
gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the
dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her
knees. —Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)

The
colors seemed very bright against the mist, and through the air, so softly we
could not be sure we heard it, came the sound of the men chanting to welcome in
the night.—Andrea
Barrett, The Forms of Water (1993)

The key
to the treasure is the treasure. —John Barth, “Dunyazadiad”from
Chimera (1972)

T-zero.
—John Barth, On with the Story (1996)

THE
HEROES DEPART IN SEARCH OF
A NEW
PRINCIPLE
HEIGH-HO
—Donald
Barthelme, Snow White (1967)

For a
minute all I could think of was what we must look like from the sky, the black
Lincoln, the two splintered headlights shooting into nothing, the two taillights
glowing red tracers behind us, the big flat space everywhere and all this dust
swelling around us like a land-sped record attempt. We rocketed across that
desert sand. —Frederick Barthelme, Painted Desert (1995)

“I’m so
glad to be at home again.” —L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(1900)

Then I
went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the
windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining. —Samuel Beckett, Molloy
(1951, trans. Patrick Bowles)

Columbus
too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which
didn’t prove there was no America. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie
March (1953)

He heard
it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the
consummation of his heart’s ultimate need. —Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
(1956)

I guess
I felt it was my turn now to move, and so went running—leaping, leaping,
pounding, and tingling over the pure white lining of the gray Arctic silence.
—Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King (1959)

At this
time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word. —Saul Bellow,
Herzog (1964)

Winona
was a notorious prig. Who would want any other kind of daughter? —Thomas Berger,
Reinhart’s Women (1981)

But in
these fair laps we must leave King Arthur, who was never historical, but
everything he did was true. —Thomas Berger, Arthur Rex (1978)

The
horizon is the straight bottom edge of a curtain arbitrarily and suddenly
lowered upon a performance. —Jon Berger, G. (1972)

Then its
pages dampened, took on the weight of the underlying depths, began to founder,
and as I readied to return home, that plot which had diverted so many, was
finally lost in darkness and distance. —R.M. Berry, Frank (2005)

You been
dead all your life since you was born, he thought, except for maybe a little
time between, nine months, and now you’re dead. —Alvah Bessie, Bread and
Stone (1941)

At the
edge of the Arab quarter the car, still loaded with people, made a wide U-turn
and stopped; it was the end of the line. —Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
(1949)

The
Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and
Robert and Mom and Dad.
The
Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling
water…. —Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950)

P.S.
Sorry I
forgot to give you the mayonnaise.
—Richard
Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America (1967)

Then
there are more and more endings: the sixth, the 53rd, the 131st, the 9,435th
ending, endings going faster and faster, more and more endings, faster and
faster until this book is having 186,000 endings per second. —Richard Brautigan,
A Confederate General from Big Sur(1964)

And the
earth’s heart is beating as it has always, will always, repeating the only word
it knows, daughter, daughter, daughter. —Kate Braverman,
Palm Latitudes (1988)

Or,
rather, let me be quiet in her memory—and in memory of me—for a little while.
—Harold Brodkey, The Runaway Soul (1991)

I
lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among
the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the
grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the
sleepers in that quiet earth. —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)

“No
glot…C’lom Fliday” —William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)

Yage may
be the final fix. —William S. Burroughs, Junky (1953)

He
laughed. He did not care what she called herself as long as she went on living.
And she would do that. No matter where she went, she would live. She would not
leave him. —Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed (1980)

Father
McConnell says prayers help. If you’ve got this far, send up one for me, and
Cora, and make it that we’re together, wherever it is. —James M. Cain, The
Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)

“Maybe I
could grow me a bale to the acre, like Pa was always talking about doing.”
—Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road (1932)

That
mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky
glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that
my brother could pass through it with his tomtit’s thread, was embroidered on
nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page,
swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at
times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry
seeds, then twisting away, forking off , surrounding buds of phrases with
frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and
on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words,
ideas, dreams, and so ends. —Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees (1959;
trans. Archibald Colquhoun)

…seek
and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not
inferno, and make them endure, give them space. —Italo Calvino, Invisible
Cities (1972; trans. William Weaver)

And you
say, “Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler
by Italo Calvino.” —Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
(1979; trans. William Weaver)

For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish
that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they
greet me with cries of hate. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans.
Matthew Ward)

He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from
books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can
lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its
time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day
would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its
rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city. —Albert Camus, The
Plague (1947; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

Begin
again! It all must be done over! 197619771978197919801981198219831984
—Jay
Cantor, The Death of Che Guevara (1983)

Then starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind
him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat. —Truman
Capote, In Cold Blood (1965)

Shining
fragments of aquarium glass fell like snow around him. And when the long-awaited
white fingers of water tapped and lapped on Oscar’s lips, he welcomed them in as
he always had, with a scream, like a small boy caught in the sheet-folds of a
nightmare. — Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (1988)

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in
the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all
her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would
gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and
eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of
long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a
pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy
summer days. —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

So, into
all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls
are doing in the world bring refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the
young, dreams. —Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915)

Whatever
we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
—Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)

‘I shall feel proud and satisfied to have been the first author to enjoy the
full fruit of his writings, as I desired, because my only desire has been to
make men hate those false, absurd histories in books of chivalry, which thanks
to the exploits of my real Don Quixote are even now tottering, and without any
doubt will soon tumble to the ground. Farewell.’ —Miguel de Cervantes, Don
Quixote (1605, 1615; trans. John Rutherford)

When Rosa and Joe picked it up they saw that Sammy had taken a pen and, bearing
down, crossed out the name of the never-more-than-theoretical family that was
printed above the address, and in its place written, sealed in a neat black
rectangle, knotted by the stout cord of an ampersand, the words KAVALIER & CLAY.
—Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)

Everyone is waiting for Father, who may, or may not, come home. —George
Chambers, The Last Man Standing (1990)

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or on a
marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big
sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as
wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the
nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness
now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn’t have to
be. He could lie quiet on his canopied bed with his bloodless hands folded on
the sheet waiting. His heart was a brief uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as
gray as ashes. And in little while, he too, like Rusty Regan would be sleeping
the big sleep.

On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They
didn’t do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig and I never
saw her again. —Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939)

I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to
say goodbye to them. —Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

I will never come back, and if I do there will be nothing left, there will be
nothing left but the headstones to record what has happened; there will really
be nothing at all. —John Cheever, The Wapshot Scandal (1963)

Tony went back to school on Monday and Nailles—drugged—went off to work and
everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been.
—John Cheever, Bullet Park (1969)

But that
is another tale, and as I said in the beginning, this is just a story meant to
be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night. —John Cheever, Oh What a
Paradise It Seems (1982)

There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. —Kate
Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

It was
calling to itself every boat on the river, every one, the whole town, and the
sky and the country and us, all of it being called away, and the Seine too,
everything—let’s hear no more of all of this. —Louis-Ferdinand Céline,
Journey to the End of the Night (1932, trans. Ralph Manheim)

This is
not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid,
like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead
nowhere. —J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

“Stein has aged greatly of late. He feels it himself, and says often that he is
‘preparing to leave all this; preparing to leave…’ while he waves his hand sadly
at his butterflies.” —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway
leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast
sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. —Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness (1902)

Let’s say the extremely smooth grass in cemeteries is fake grass, and there is
no one and nothing underneath it. —Dennis Cooper, God Jr. (2005)

“My day
has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of Unamis happy and strong;
and yet,
before the night has come, have I lived to see the last warrior of the wise race
of the Mohicans.” —James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

“Vaya
con Dios, my darklin’, and remember: vote early and vote often, don’t take any
wooden nickels, and”—by now I was rolling about helplessly on the spare-room
floor, scrunched up around my throbbing pain and bawling like a baby—“always
leave ’em laughin’ as you say good-bye!” —Robert Coover, The Public Burning
(1977)

And
since all along there had been too many ends to the story, and since they did
not end anything, but only continued something, something not formed into any
story, I needed an act of ceremony to end the story. —Lydia Davis, The End of
the Story (1995)

My husband remained there some time after me to settle our affairs, and at first
I had intended to go back to him, but at his desire I altered that resolution,
and he is come over to England also, where we resolve to spend the remainder of
our years in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived. —Daniel
DeFoe, Moll Flanders (1722)

In the end they had to carry me to the infirmary and feed me through plastic
tubes. —Don DeLillo, End Zone (1972)

The most beguiling of the rumors has me living among beggars and syphilitics,
performing good works, patron saint of all those men who hear the river-whistles
sing the mysteries and who return to sleep in wine by the south wheel of the
city. —Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (1973)

It made no sound, or none that he could hear, laughing as he was, this noise
resembling laughter, expressing vocally what appeared to be a compelling
emotion, crying out as he was, gasping into the stillness, emitting as he was
this series of involuntary shrieks, particles bouncing in the air around him,
the reproductive dust of existence —Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star (1976)

It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world. —Don
DeLillo, The Names (1982)

Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The
tales of the supernatural and extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures
for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead. —Don
DeLillo, White Noise (1985)

Peace. —Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997)

Then he
saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving
like nothing in this life. —Don DeLillo, Falling Man (2007)

But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is
very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has
the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen, and that they can
very well do without much beauty in me—even supposing—. —Charles Dickens,
Bleak House (1853)

O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may
I, when realities are melting from me like the shadows which I now dismiss,
still find thee near me, pointing upward! —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
(1849-50)

We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires
turn grey and cold. —Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)

They went quietly down in the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed, and as
they passed along in the sunshine and the shade, the noisy and the eager, and
the arrogant and the forward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their
usual uproar.

—Charles
Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857)

‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far,
far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’ —Charles Dickens, A
Tale of Two Cities (1859)

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the
morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening
mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they
showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her. —Charles Dickens,
Great Expectations (1860-61)

And Harry K. Thaw, having obtained his release from the insane asylum, marched
annually at Newport in the Armistice Day parade. —E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime
(1975)

There was some confusion after that, of course, we had to go out and buy bottles
and diapers, he didn’t come with any instructions, and my mother was a little
slow remembering some of the things that had to be done when he cried and waved
his arms about, but we adjusted to him soon enough and what I think of now is
how we used to like to go back to the East Bronx with him and walk him in his
carriage on a sunny day along Bathgate Avenue, with all the peddlers calling out
their prices and the stalls stacked with pyramids of oranges and grapes and
peaches and melons, and the fresh bread in the windows of the bakeries with the
electric fans in their transoms sending hot bread smells into the air, and the
dairy with its tubs of butter and wood packs of farmer’s cheese, and the butcher
wearing his thick sweater under his apron walking out of his ice room with a
stack of chops on oiled paper, and the florist on the corner wetting down the
vases of clustered cut flowers, and the children running past, and the gabbling
old women carrying their shopping bags of greens and chickens, and the teenage
girls holding white dresses on hangers to their shoulders, and the truckmen in
their undershirts unloading their produce, and the horns honking and all the
life of the city turning out to greet us just as in the old days of our
happiness, before my father fled, when the family used to go walking in this
market, this bazaar of life, Bathgate, in the age of Dutch Schultz. —E. L.
Doctorow, Billy Bathgate (1989)

God’s mercy

On the wild

Ginger Man.

—J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (1958)

On John Andrews’s writing table the brisk wind rustled among the broad sheets of
paper. First one sheet, then another, blew off the table, until the floor was
littered with them. —John dos Passos, Three Soldiers (1921)

But that
is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the
story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another,
of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new
story, but our present story is ended. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and
Punishment (1866; trans. Constance Garnett)

But to
us too it seems that this will be a good place to stop. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

In your
rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your
rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never
feel. —Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

The
small company, minus Russell, entered the yellow, unprepossessing door and
disappeared. —Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925)

Fin.
Fin? —Coleman Dowell, Mrs. October Was Here (1974)

And he
hoped they would wake him in time to swing his legs over the bedside in the
near- dark, to be sitting straight and ready as Jim’s alarm went off, and his
bedsprings squeaked, and Leo heard his father, coming for him. —Andre Dubus III,
Bluesman (1993)

And that
pulsing behind her, close upon the twin orbs of her bountiful posterior, kneeled
a great beaked figure—an enigmatic lôplôp…. —Rikki Ducornet, Phosphor in
Dreamland (1995)

We had
the castle within us. We carried it away. —William Eastlake, The Castle
(1965)

There
was death—she was our captain’s bride. —William Eastlake, The Bamboo Bed
(1969)

I leave
this manuscript, I do not know for whom, I no longer know what it is about:
stat rosa prinstina nomine, nomine nuda tenemus. —Umberto Eco, The Name
of the Rose (1983)

But the
effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the
growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that
things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to
the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871—72)

“In
their death they were not divided.” —George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
(1860)

Who
knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? —Ralph Ellison,
Invisible Man (1952)

Through
the warm fog of his last breath, he watched the memories of a hundred ghosts
drift skyward to finally and vainly burst. —Steve Erickson, Tours of the
Black Clock (1989)

It
didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but
only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not
hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies,
calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone
in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces
to put them back together. —Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (1993)

He
waited for someone to tell him who to be next. —Brian Evenson, The Open
Curtain (2006)

And when
again the vision comes, I find that, ready to do battle, I am running:
obsessively running. —Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes (1968)

The
broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and
serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right,
post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.
—William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

then it
does not necessarily have to be NOODLES! —Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing
(1971)

Good
bye, my friend, take it easy, and as we say in America when starting a new life,
wish me luck… —Raymond Federman, Aunt Rachel’s Fur (2001; trans.
Raymond Federman and Patricia Privat-Standley)

It’s
only a book, they
would say. That’s all it is. A story. Just a story. —Timothy Findley,
Headhunter (1993)

And such
is their condescension, their indulgence, and their beneficence to those below
them, that there is not a neighbor, a tenant, or a servant, who doth not most
gratefully bless the day when Mr. Jones was married to his Sophia. —Henry
Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749)

So we
beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. —F.
Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

He has
just received the cross of the Legion of Honour. —Gustave Flaubert, Madame
Bovary (1857; trans. Margaret Mauldon)

I will walk without noise, and I will open the door in darkness, and I will
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2002)

And in
truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way
again.
—Richard
Ford, The Sportswriter (1986)

I wanted to say, “God bless you”, for I also am a sentimentalist. But I thought
that perhaps that would not be quite English good form, so I trotted off with
the telegram to

Leonora.
She was quite pleased with it. —Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

The song
died away; they heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the
Mediterranean. —E.M. Forster, A Room with a View (1908)

But the
horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up
rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the
jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view
as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want, they said in
their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.” —E.M.
Forster, A Passage to India (1924)

And out
again, upon the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea. —John Fowles, The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

They
disappear among the poplars. The meadow is empty. The river, the meadow, the
cliff and cloud.
The
princess calls, but there is no one, now, to hear her.
—John
Fowles, The Ebony Tower (1974)

What
exists, though, is the memory of events known and imagined, and the use of words
to continue the memory through centuries, despite or with the Gravity Star, to a
future when today, our Now, will be known as our past has been known as Ancient
Springtime, while we, who treasure the Memory Flower, are the housekeepers of
Ancient Springtime. —Janet Frame, The Carpathians (1988)

What
matters is that I have what I gave; nothing is completely taken; we meet in the
common meeting place in the calm of stone, the frozen murmurs of life,
squamata, sauria, serpentes; in the sanctuary. —Janet Frame, Daughter
Buffalo (1972)

She was
seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life. —Jonathan
Franzen, The Corrections (2001)

I am
looking now into a mirror, watching Father die. Behind me my son and daughter
stand, also watching Father die. —B.H. Friedman, Watching Father Die,
from Coming Close (1982)

She came
over, and it occurred to him that he would like to try something a little
theatrical, just kneel there quietly with his arms protectively draped around
his wife and child. He tried it and wound up holding them a fraction longer than
he’d intended. —Bruce J. Friedman, Stern (1962)

No one
remembers the whole story. —Carlos Fuentes, Distant Relations (1980;
trans. Margaret Sayers Peden)
From the
sky a swift Angel descends, an Angel with a golden helmet and green spurs, a
flaming sword in his hand, an Angel escaped from the Indo-Hispanic altars of
opulent hunger, from need overcome by sleep, from the coupling of opposites:
body and soul, wakefulness and death, living and sleeping, remembering and
desiring, imagining: the happy boy who reaches the sad land carries all this on
his lips, he bears the memory of death, white and extinguished, like the flame
that went out in his mother’s belly: for a swift, marvelous instant, the boy
being born knows that this light of memory, wisdom, and death was an Angel and
that this other Angel who flies from the navel of heaven with the sword in his
hand is the fraternal enemy of the first: he is the Baroque Angel, with a sword
in his hand and quetzal wings, and a serpent doublet, and a golden helmet, the
Angel strikes, strikes the lips of the boy being born on the beach: the burning
and painful sword

He was
the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was
recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard,
though seldom played. —William H. Gaddis, The Recognitions (1955)

So I
mean listen I got this neat idea hey, you listening? Hey? You listening…?
—William Gaddis, J R (1975)

Stop I
can’t, no stop tickling me I can’t breathe! I can’t, Lily! Lily come here
quickly I can’t, Lily help me! —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own
(1994)

I’ve
always been crazy about the back of your neck. —William Gaddis, Carpenter’s
Gothic (1985)

It was
as if a swan had sung! —John Galsworthy, Swan Song (1928)

“Poor
Grendel’s had an accident,” I whisper. “So may you all.” —John Gardner,
Grendel (1971)

He came
lightly down the metal steps into balmy air and diesel fumes, and feeling in
himself the potent allegiance of fate, he pushed open the door to the lobby,
where unkempt sleepers slumped upright on the benches. —Leonard Gardner, Fat
City (1969)

Meanwhile carry on without complaining. No arm with armband raised on high. No
more booming bands, no searchlit skies. Or shall I, like the rivers, rise? Ah.
Well. Is rising wise? Revolver like the Führer near an ear. Or lay my mind down
by sorrow’s side. —William Gass, The Tunnel (1999)

I left
him there. —William Goldman, The Temple of Gold (1957)

He took
possession of this earth, theirs; one of them. —Nadine Gordimer, The
Conservationist (1974)

Over in
England they were married and lived happily ever after. —Henry Green, Loving
(1945)

On the
whole he was well satisfied with his day. He fell asleep almost at once in the
yellow woolen nightshirt. —Henry Green, Concluding (1948)

The next
day they all went on very much the same. —Henry Green, Doting (1952)

She
walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.
—Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (1938)

Leave me
alone forever. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there
existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry. —Graham Greene, The
Quiet American (1956)

“There are three of us,” Wormwold said, and she realized the chief problem of
their future—that he would never be quite mad enough. —Graham Greene, Our Man
in Havana (1958)

And so
John pulled the gospel quilt snug around his ear and fell into a dreamless
winter sleep, curled up beneath the quaint, stiff calico figures of the world’s
forgotten kings, and the strong, gentle shepherds of that fallen, ancient time
who had guarded their small lambs against that night. —Davis Grubb, The Night
of the Hunter (1953)

His body
jolted backward, jolted the floorboards, and Ella Mae Waterson screamed, but
Robert Ford only looked at the ceiling, the light going out of his eyes before
he could say the right words. —Ron Hansen, The Assassination of Jesse James
by the Coward Robt. Ford (1984)

“But since ‘tis as ‘tis why, it might have been worse, and I feel my thanks
accordingly.” —Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)

“She’s
never found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till she’s as he
is now!” —Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)

From
here on in I rag nobody. —Mark Harris, Bang the Drum Slowly (1956)

That’s
it. The sun in the evening. The moon at dawn. The still voice. —John Hawkes,
Second Skin (1964)

In
Illyria there are no seasons. —John Hawkes, The Blood Oranges (1971)

Remember
the ghosts of dead flowers. —John Hawkes, Virginie: Her Two Lives (1982)

It bore
a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve for a motto and brief
description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by
one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:—“On a field, sable,
the letter A, gules.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)

And wise
Uncle Venner, passing slowly from the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of
music, and fancied that sweet Alice Pyncheon—after witnessing these deeds, this
by-gone woe, and this present happiness, of her kindred mortals—had given one
farewell touch of a spirit’s joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward
from the House of the Seven Gables! —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the
Seven Gables (1851)

Within
the cabin, nothing could be heard. Only, as the plane rose from the ground, a
long hiss of air—like the intake of humanity’s breath when a work of ages
shrivels in an instant; or the great gasp of hull and ocean as a ship goes down.
—Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus (1980)

The
knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off. —Joseph Heller,
Catch-22 (1961)

He was
not surprised, and he began to think seriously of writing the book you’ve just
read. —Joseph Heller, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000)

“Yes,” I
said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” —Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
(1926)

After a
while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
—Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

He could
feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest. —Ernest
Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

The old
man was dreaming about the lions. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
(1952)

“More,”
he said and when it was ready the huge machine now box-like tank-like blue and
silver and gold rolling on three wheels and a sidecar the huge engine between
his knees he rolled forth across the land, he would go from coast to coast city
and farm exposing the lies the dreams, the demons of the country, he could hear
her singing in the air, he could through all her darkest nights he could see the
country, hear the country get it all at last and so the new god rolled speeding
through the nights, the clouds darkening once over Kansas, the wind rising
slowly he rolled speeding through the country and the waste, sometimes people
awoke thinking they had heard a heartbeat in the night, and it did not stop the
electronic bike until outside Kansas City on Route 22 when folks said a terrible
noise went up a flash split across the sky like nothing they could remember.
—Carol de Chellis Hill, Jeremiah 8:20 (1970)

And the
question haunts me—will I, can I, after my knowledge of these things, still hear
the sounds of song? —Carol de Chellis Hill, Henry James’ Midnight Song
(1993)

I
figured if I didn’t see, I’d start forgetting again. But it’s been taking me
longer than I thought it would. —S.E. Hinton, Rumble Fish (1975)

Stil I
wunt have no other track. —Russell Hoban, Ridley Walker (1980)

She
turned on a lamp, checked her appointment book, sorted the magazines in the
waiting room, refilled the Kleenex supply, plumped the pillows on her sofa, and
then sat down in her chair, ready. —A.M. Homes, In a Country of Mothers
(1993)

“I don’t
know as I should always say it paid; but if I done it, and the thing was to do
over again, right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it.” —William
Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)

Looking
at that gentle, happy throng of clean innocent faces and soft graceful limbs,
listening to the ceaseless, artless babble of chatter rising, perhaps God could
have picked out from among them which was Emily; but I am sure that I could not.
—Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica (1929)

So much
of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see. —Zora Neale
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards
the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then
paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left.
South-south-west, south, south-east, east…. —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
(1932)

Newman
instinctively turned to see if the little paper was in fact consumed; but there
was nothing left of it. —Henry James, The American (1877)

We were
alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
—Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)

“We shall never be again as we were!” —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
(1902)

“Then there we are!” said Strether. —Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)

He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked,
perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that
was to settle him. His eyes darkened—it was close; and, instinctively turning,
in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.
—Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle (1903)

She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to
patience. —Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1908)

But that was just a story, something that people will tell themselves, something
to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to
be consumed itself, depending on who is the candle and who is the light. —Denis
Johnson, Angels (1983)

My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am and keeps me from
desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I
still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a
vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the
thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my
birthright for a mess of pottage. —James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of
an Ex-Coloured Man (1912)

One day one of their number would write a book about all this, but none of them
would believe it, because none of them would remember it that way. —James Jones,
The Thin Red Line (1962)

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the
universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the
living and the dead. —James Joyce, “The Dead” in Dubliners (1914)

Old
father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. —James Joyce, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

…I was a
Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian
girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall
and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to
ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and
first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my
breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I
will Yes. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

A way a lone a last a loved a long the —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
(1939)

“Like a
dog!” he said, it was as if the shame of it must outlive him. —Franz Kafka,
The Trial (1925; trans. Willa and Edwin Muir)

I am the
author of Peter Prince. —Steve Katz, The Exagggerations of Peter Prince
(1968)

And with
Footers beside him, and Martin trailing with an amused smile, Billy went out
into the early freeze that was just settling on Broadway and made a right turn
into the warmth of the stairs to Louie’s pool room, a place where even serious
men sometimes go to seek the meaning of magical webs, mystical coin, golden
birds, and other artifacts of the only cosmos in town. —William Kennedy,
Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978)

So in
America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier
watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that
rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road
going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now
the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and
tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the
evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie,
which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth,
darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody,
nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of
growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the
father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. —Jack Kerouac, On the Road
(1957)

By God.
—Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax (1959)

Something good will come out of all things yet—And it will be golden and eternal
just like that—There’s no need to say another word. —Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
(1962)

I been
away a long time. —Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)

Above
the farm, a moon bright as butter silvers the night as Annie holds the door open
for me. —W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe (1982)

Darmolatov’s case was entered in all the latest pathology textbooks. A
photograph of his scrotum, the size of the biggest collective farm pumpkin, is
also reprinted in foreign medical books, wherever elephantiasis (elephantiasis
nostras) is mentioned, and as a moral for writers that to write one must have
more than big balls. —Danilo Kis, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1978;
trans. Diska Mikic-Mitchell)

All of
them, except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot
Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy
who never attacked that way—if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the
enemy. —John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959)

I spoke
loudly and incessantly like the peasants and then like the city folk, as fast as
I could, enraptured by the sounds that were heavy with meaning, as wet snow is
heavy with water, confirming to myself again and again and again that speech was
now mine and that it did not intend to escape through the door which opened onto
the balcony. —Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird (1965)

“Well,”
I said, “let me tell you,” and I told them a briefer, simpler version of the
story I have just told you, and while I was telling it, my mother, Ella, who for
one unforgettable summer ran Ella’s Lunch Launch, died. —Eric Kraft,
Inflating a Dog: The Story of Ella’s Lunch Launch (2002)

The
others listened with interest, their naked genitals staring dully, sadly,
listlessly at the yellow sand. —Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting (1979; trans. Michael Henry Heim)

She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption
of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of
Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven. —D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
(1915)

He fell back into the net, which rocked imperceptibly above them, and he sang
quietly to himself, as if that helped him negotiate his exhaustion. —Stacey
Levine, Dra— (1997)

Arms about each other’s shoulders, the Babbitt men marched into the living-room
and faced the swooping family. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

He was, indeed, so confidently happy that he completely forgot Fran and he did
not again yearn over her, for almost two days. —Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth
(1929)

“Dear
Lord, thy work is but begun! We shall yet make these United States a moral
nation!” —Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

He was in mid-sentence when they wrested away his final remaining
possession—yes, his laptop!—and he di —Mark Leyner, Et Tu, Babe (1992)

I pop
out of the little nuts like a little china doll, la-de-da, and I grow, la-de-da,
she gives me her arm, we are once upon a time, we go in, we go in on the leg of
a duck and come out, come out on the leg of a chicken, there we go, she and I,
the Báçira, toward the impossible limitiferous, to the onceuponatimiferous, to
the Reciferous, to the open dooriferous, to the suckling piggiferous, to the
axis of the universiferous, to the point of no returniferous, to the
ampliferous, to the sonofabitchiferous, to the immensiferous, to the iferous, to
the Báçira-baciferous. —Osman Lins, The Queen of the Prisons of Greece
(1976; trans. Adria Frizzi)

P.S. And now the time has come to lend an ear to—au revoir, pleasant dree yums,
think of us when requesting your three yums—until the next time when possibly
you may tune in again, keep the Old Maestro always in your schee yums, yowsah,
yowsah, yowsah—au revoir—may good luck and happiness, success, good health,
attend your schee yums, and don’t forget we’ll try to do our besta, yowsayh,
yowsah, yowsah—au revoir, a fond cheerio, a bit of a tweet-tweet,

and good night and God bless
you

and pleasant

dree yums

—Gordon Lish, Dear Mr. Capote (1986)

When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the
lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale
moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great
throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of
the pack. —Jack London, The Call of the Wild (1903)

And at
the instant he knew, he ceased to know. —Jack London, Martin Eden (1909)

Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine. —Malcolm Lowry, Under
the Volcano (1947)

So the
blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until
their voices are lost. —Norman Mailer, Barbary Shore (1951)

Then for
a moment in that cold Irish soul of mine, a glimmer of the joy of the flesh came
toward me, rare as the eye of the rarest tear of compassion, and we laughed
together after all, because to have heard that sex was time and time the
connection of new circuits was a part of the poor odd dialogues which give hope
to us noble humans for more than one night. —Normal Mailer, The Deer Park
(1955)

Vietnam,
hot dam. —Norman Mailer, Why are We in Vietnam? (1967)

TO BE
CONTINUED —Norman Mailer, Harlot’s Ghost (1991)

I just
have to believe that this one ain’t much worse than the baddest we ever faced.
—Clarence Major, Such was the Season (1987)

After
Passover he became a Jew. —Bernard Malamud, The Assistant (1957)

Roger
Foster waited in the shadow of a long-boughed two-trunked silver maple as Dubin
ran up the moonlit road, holding his half-stiffened phallus in his hand, for his
wife with love. —Bernard Malamud, Dubin’s Lives (1979)

Before
reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never
leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would
be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment
when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that
everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever
more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a
second opportunity on earth. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred years of
Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

Before
reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never
leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would
be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment
when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that
everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever
more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a
second opportunity on earth. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of
Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

Being
continued. —David Markson, Springer’s Progress (1977)

The old
man who will not laugh is a fool.
Als ick
kan.
—David
Markson, The Last Novel (2007)

Very
few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none
in the company of an adult Bengal tiger. —Yann
Martel, Life of Pi (2001)

I put my
left hand on his left hand and waved my other hand in front of him and realized
that both his eyes were darkened now with his wonderful and perfect sight.
—Carole Maso, The Art Lover (1990)

He is
sitting there cross-legged in front of the wall, and slowly his face bursts into
a smile like flames. —Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (1985)

Cabs and omnibuses hurried to and fro, and crowds passed, hastening in every
direction, and the sun was shining. —Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
(1915)

He’s
w/Cleo 8/hrs a day & Sharon is w/her father 24 a day & Teri doesn’t have even
the slightest twinge of guilt when she gets a new job as live-in-nanny for a
retarded handicapped girl landing the job not on the basis of having been
a long-time employee of a state ward for severely mentally & physically
incapacitated children but on the basis of
1st of
all her willingness to maintain the property’s landscaping & 2ndly her own
personal experience of having had her own seriously handicapped—no call it
disabled maybe impaired but hopefully not incurable—child. —Cris Maza,
Disability (2005)

He told
me what he was going to do when he won his money then I said it was time to go
tracking in the mountains, so off we went, counting our footprints in the snow,
him with his bony arse clicking and me with the tears streaming down my face.
—Patrick McCabe,

The
Butcher Boy(1992)

He never
sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)

Passed
and paled into the darkening land, the world to come. —Cormac McCarthy, All
the Pretty Horses (1992)

In the
deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of
mystery. —Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

As if,
in that wide-ranging anthology of stories that was the lives of the saints—that
was, as well, my father’s faith and Billy’s and some part of my own—what was
actual, as opposed to what was imagined, as opposed to what was believed, made,
when you got right down to it, any difference at all. —Alice McDermont,
Charming Billy (1998)

Everyone
was looking up at me and Sub, and I was not sure what I had seen but I knew what
we had done. —Joseph McElroy, Lookout Cartridge (1974)

He
thought he would stand here awhile. —Joseph McElroy, Women and Men (1987)

He fits
himself around her, her silk pyjamas, her scent, her warmth, her beloved form,
and draws closer to her. Blindly, he kisses her nape. There’s always this, is
one of his remaining thoughts. And then: there’s only this. And at last,
faintly, falling: this day’s over. —Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005)

Instead,
he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry
along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of
small waves, until she was a blurred, receding point against the immense
straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light. —Ian McEwan, On Chesil
Beach (2007)

You will have to learn everything all over again. —Jay McInerney Bright
Lights, Big City (1984)

“I had rather go see the rivers,” I said, but I don’t know if he heard me and if
he did he wouldn’t have understood, he was too normal to understand, if my
friends came and asked him why I had left he wouldn’t know, he had never stood
in the river, I don’t think he swirled as I was swirling, he didn’t seem to
yearn to flow, he didn’t much want to be undertaken, he didn’t remember Zapata
and hadn’t even read the great Juan de la Cosa, and if they came, my friends, if
Wu came, for some reason, or Godwin, or Jenny, they wouldn’t get it from him, he
wouldn’t know why I loved the river, why I loved any of the people I loved, they
wouldn’t get it from him and none of them could guess, only maybe Jill could, I
knew only Jill could, if I had stayed, if she had stayed, I could tell her, she
might guess, she had the clearest eyes, the straightest look, the most honest
face, I missed it so—but ah no, no chance, better to just want rivers—Jill was
gone. —Larry McMurtry, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972)

The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of
subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites;
and across the Plaza looked toward St. Bartholomew’s church, in whose vaults
slept then, as now, the recovered bones of Aranda; and across the Rimac bridge
looked toward the monastery, on Mount Agonia without; where, three months after
being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did, indeed,
follow his leader. —Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855)

Something further may follow of this Masquerade. —Herman Melville, The
Confidence Man (1857)

But
wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted
place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be
playing. —A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (1928)

“Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is
another day.” —Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936)

When she
looks back at the car, what Melissa sees in Nona: Nona twisting around in the
driver’s seat to look behind and, with one arm grasping the seat top beside her,
backing out of the station at a speed that seems then and at all other moments,
incredible. —Ted Mooney, Easy Travel to Other Planets (1981)

At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my
town, it’s much, much, much too late. —Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
(1970)

It was a
fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and
circles of sorrow. —Toni Morrison, Sula (1973)

For now she knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could
ride it. —Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977)

By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints
but the water too and what is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of
the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves or spring ice
thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.

Beloved.

—Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Look
where your hands are. Now. —Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992)

Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do
down here in Paradise. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

From the roof there fluttered eggs and roses. —Nicholas Mosley, Impossible
Object (1968)

The hands shadow themselves against the wall, large, touch in huge shadows on
the wall, merge, move as one huge hand toward death. —Willard Motley, Knock
on Any Door (1947)

I am out the door and in the potholed and rutted driveway, scrambling ahead of
Taylor, greedy with wants and reckless from hope. —Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine
(1989)

I closed
my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to
get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off
for a moment. —Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-95;
trans. Jay Rubin)

Gripping
the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone
booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All
that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to
nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this
place that was no place. —Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (1987; trans.
Jay Rubin)

I closed
my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to
get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off
for a moment. —Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994/5;
trans. Jay Rubin)

“You’d
better get some sleep,” the boy names Crow says. “When you wake up, you’ll be
part of a brand-new world.”
You
finally fall asleep. And when you wake up, it’s true.
You are
part of a brand-new world.
—Haruki
Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (2002; trans. J. Philip Gabriel)

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic
sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may
share, my Lolita. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will
quietly set out—somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is
buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking
toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door—a bigger,
more respectable, more competent Gradus. —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
(1962)

In her mind’s eye, she could clearly see Luziana as she’d been then, when her
baby lived inside her, when she still attended school, sitting in her melancholy
pose, lifting the massive, overwhelming anthology, her skinny arm a mere flower
stem, weak under the weight of all those sad stories. —Antonya Nelson,
Nobody’s Girl (1998)

The men
began singing, a grave slow song that drifted away into the night. Soon the road
was empty. All that remained of the German regiment was a little cloud of dust.
—Irène Némirovsky, Suite Francaise (2006; trans. Sandra Smith)

McTeague
remained stupidly looking around him, now at the distant horizon, now at the
ground, now at the half-dead canary chittering feebly in its little gilt prison.
—Frank Norris, McTeague (1899)

He took
his sister’s hand and kissed it and said good-by, making an ironic, affectionate
bow over her with his head; it was the Jules she had always loved, and now she
loved him for going away, saying good-by, leaving her forever. —Joyce Carol
Oates, Them (1969)

Could
the truth be so simple? So terrible? —Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods
(1994)

She sat
staring with her eyes shut, into his eyes, and felt as if she had finally got to
the beginning of something she couldn’t begin, and she saw him moving farther
and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin
point of light. —Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952)

The
Reddingtons always went to a hotel where the women guests were not permitted to
smoke. —John O’Hara, Butterfield 8 (1935)

How they
say the camera catches you, but how in point of fact you will always be
able to get away. —Lance Olsen, Girl Imagined by Chance (2002)

Milo
Magnani glows with quiet pride, gives their thoughts back to these people, and,
straightening his bowtie unnecessarily, rises to depart. Around him, throats
clear, feet scrape, candy wrappers crinkle. The world grows brighter and
brighter and brighter. Milo inhales and exhales. He waits. The film
begins.—Lance Olsen, 10:01 (2005)

Time
longer than rope.
—Toby Olson, Write Letter to Billy (2000)

A dream
can be the highest point of a life. —Ben Okri, The Famished Road (1991)

There
are no prizes. —Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter (1976)

But
apart from seeing Jokey again, my life remained an uninflected one of stalking
around unbothered, until finally one day a thought succeeded in forming itself:
that what had been a lifelong irritant—that I walked around the world unseen, as
if invisible—had now become a strange and beautiful blessing, freeing me to live
my life all over again, as if the previous one had only been a rough draft, a
vague outline to be crossed over, exceeded, to be transcended, as if that life
was the earthly life and this one, the California one, with myself benumbed and
calm and floating inside the bubble of mall after white mall—places that were
like hospitals with their piped-in music and blanching light—as if this life,
finally, was the heavenly one. —Han Ong, Fixer Chao (2001)

He loved Big Brother. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

The
creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to
man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. —George Orwell,
Animal Farm (1945)

Have I
betrayed them all again by telling the story? Or is it the other way around:
would I have betrayed them if I had not told it? —Amos Oz, Panther in the
Basement (1995; trans. Nicholas de Lange)

And
then, in the blue light of Stockholm among zebra fumes, he grieved. —Cynthia
Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm (1987)

For the
sake of a delightful and convincing story, there isn’t a lie Orhan wouldn’t
deign to tell. —Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red (1998; trans. Erdag M.
Goknar)

For it
is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never
failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of
bondage and bondage of fear, why, that is a secret. —Alan Paton, Cry, the
Beloved Country (1948)

I watch
her walk toward St Charles, cape jasmine held against her cheek, until my
brothers and sisters call out behind me. —Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
(1961)

The
plant barricade around Moseley’s desk rustled, and out of the crack in the
foliage peeked the rare species in question: on all sides of Mays—here at hand,
across town at The Trading Floor, even so far away as on a muddy road in a
decade that would never again open except to the cheap and readily available
silver halide print—lay that most elusive, universal, persistent quantity,
always in need of foreign aid, the Other Fellow. —Richard Powers, Three
Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)

“Morning,” Milo said. Then they both looked up to the lifting sky—Lois followed
their eyes—and found they were right. It was morning (clear, cloudless, the
oldest gift), would be morning oh six hours yet. —Reynolds Price, A Generous
Man (1966)

The
room, though, is still. No one has breathed. —Reynolds Price, Love & Work
(1968)

And it
may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery. —E. Annie Proulx,
The Shipping News (1993)

There
was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but
nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.
—E. Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain (1999).

If, at
least, there were granted me time enough to complete my work, I would not fail
to stamp it with the seal of that Time the understanding of which was this day
so forcibly impressing itself upon me, and I would therein describe men—even
should that give the semblance of monstrous creatures—as occupying in Time a
place far more considerable than the so restricted one allotted them in space, a
place, on the contrary, extending boundlessly since, giant-like, reaching far
back into the years, they touch simultaneously epochs of their lives—with
countless intervening days between—so widely separated from one another in Time.
—Marcel Proust, Time Regained (1927; trans. Frederick A. Blossom)

They
were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed
our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a
particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the
years. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913; trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff
and Terence Kilmartin)

Madame
Girard, however, though she never mentioned Malcolm—indeed she had no one to
mention him to, since her new friends, such as the Italian biochemist, had never
heard of him—Madame Girard continued to read with interest and surprise the 300
pages of manuscript which Malcolm had left behind him, in French and English,
his “conversations” with his friends, and although they had been written at
times in delirium, and always in high fever, they continually held her
attention, and she regretted he had not lived to record all the conversations he
had ever had with all whom he had ever met. —James Purdy, Malcolm (1959)

No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass
with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her
handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our
absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does
not hope, and always for me and Sylvie. —Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
(1980)

And me! This me who is me being me and none other! —Phillip Roth, My
Life as a Man (1974)

It was now an African Methodist Episcopal Church. —Phillip Roth, Zuckerman
Unbound (1981)

To
escape into what, Marietta? It may be as you say that this is no life, but use
your enchanting, enrapturing brains: this life is as close to life as you, and
I, and our child can hope to come. —Philip Roth, The Counterlife
(1988)

And he couldn’t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could
he go? Everything he hated was here. —Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater
(1995)

Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four
hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just
as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son
who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first
generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible
gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and
the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times,
to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the
multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. —Salman Rushdie,
Midnight’s Children (1981)

out
walking by magnolia blossoms cups and entirely inside as there is no sense of
there being anything in there. —Leslie Scalapino, Orion in The Return
of Painting, the Pearl, and Orion: A Trilogy (1991)

…in the
Holland of his time it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to
drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting
landscapes or people or fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the
body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of
itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost for ever. —W.G. Sebald,
The Rings of Saturn (1995; trans. Michael Hulse)

Abraham
slept. —Hubert Selby, Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964)

He was
soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance. —Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein (1818)

“It is
written, ‘For ye shall go out with joy.’ That was what she wished.” —Frances
Sherwood, The Book of Splendor (2002)

“Well,”
the editor finally sighed, “I suppose we could release it as a novel.” —Lee
Siegel, Love and Other Games of Chance (2003)

Now
let me say something.
—Alan Singer, Dirtmouth (2004)

I can’t
say that I forgive my father, but now I can imagine what he probably chose never
to remember—the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him,
wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he
wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the
very darkness. This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all the
others. —Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (1991)

…and to
all you other cats and chicks out there, sweet or otherwise, buried deep in
wordy tombs, who never yet have walked from off the page, a shake and a hug and
a kiss and a drink. Cheers! —Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew (1979)

Ecstatic, he feels the world on the edge of obliteration. —Gilbert Sorrentino,
Red the Fiend (1995)

He
wants, even more than he wants to be alive again, to be dead with them, but he
is dead with himself alone. —Gilbert Sorrentino, A Strange Commonplace
(2006)

This is
the difference between this and that. —Gertrude Stein, A Novel of Thank You
(1958)

She
looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled
mysteriously. —John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Madame
de Rênal was faithful to her promise. She did not try in any way to shorten her
life, but three days after Julien, she died while hugging her children.
—Stendhal, The Red and the Black (1830; trans. Burton Raffel)

L--d!
said my mother, what is all this story about?——
A COCK
and a BULL, said Yorick——And one of the best of its kind I ever heard.
—Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759—1767)

Here
then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the
life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end. —Robert Louis Stevenson, The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

Oxen and
wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst
dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or
start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my
ears: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’ —Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure
Island (1882)

“I’m
gonna bust up the bar.” —Robert Stone, A Hall of Mirrors (1964)

Not by combining together, to protect injustice and cruelty, and making a common
capital of sin, is this Union to be saved, —but by repentance, justice and
mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the
ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on
nations the wrath of Almighty God! —Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852)

this way
this way this way this way this way this way this
way out
this
way out
O
—Ronald
Sukenick, Out (1973)

Another
Failure. —Ronald Sukenick, 98.6 (1975)

like a
warning the only escape from history into the dynamics of the pure present the
ultimate coincidence where everything happens at once as I sit here reading
dictation from the void —Ronald Sukenick, Last Fall (2005)

I dwell
the longer upon this subject from the desire I have to make the society of an
English YAHOO by any means not insupportable; and therefore I here entreat those
who have any tincture of this absurd vice, that they will not presume to come in
my sight. —Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

Then I
throw the last handful and the seagulls come back on a second chance and I hold
up the jar, shaking it, like I should chuck it out to sea too, a message in a
bottle, Jack Arthur Dodds, save our souls, and the ash that I carried in my
hands, which was the Jack who once walked around, is carried aways by the wind,
is whirled away by the wind till the ash becomes wind and the wind becomes Jack
what we’re made of. —Graham Swift, Last Orders (1996)

Yukiko’s
diarrhoea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to
Tokyo. —Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (1943-48)

Come,
children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
—William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847—48)

“I shall
go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into
angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the
same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife;
I shall still go on scolding her for my own fright and being remorseful for it;
I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall
still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can
happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but
it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”
—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877, trans. Constance Garnett)

Taking
the pigtail in one of his paws, he pressed it warmly to his wet moustache. —John
Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)

The sun
arises. Gold-glowing child, it steps into the sky and sends a birth-song
slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town. —Jean
Toomer, Cane (1923)

The
Author now leaves him in the hands of his readers; not as a hero, not as a man
to be admired and talked of, not as a man who should be toasted at public
dinners and spoken of with conventional absurdity as a perfect divine, but as a
good man without guile, believing humbly in the religion which he strives to
teach, and guided by the precepts which he has striven to learn. —Anthony
Trollope, Barchester Towers (1847)

But I
reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt
Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there
before. —Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and the
creditors sold him down the river. —Mark Twain, Puddn’head Wilson (1894)

We were
doomed to die and we were no longer linked to life by any kind of
responsibility. We could be as free as the pigs who ran in the field. Those were
beautiful years, beautiful autumn days. —Mati Unit, Things in the Night
(1990; trans. Eric Dickens)

Ah: runs.
Runs. —John Updike, Rabbit, Run (1960)

Girls
walk by me carrying their invisible bouquets from fields still steeped in grace,
and I look up in the manner of one who follows with his eyes the passage of a
hearse, and remembers what pierces him. —John Updike, Olinger Stories
(1964)

The
Hanemas live in Lexington, where, gradually, among people like themselves, they
have been accepted, as another couple. —John Updike, Couples (1968)

He had
made it, he was here, in Heaven. Now what? —John Updike, Bech: A Book
(1970)

Obsolete
at their own ceremony, Joan and Richard stepped back from the bench in unison
and stood side by side, uncertain of how to turn, until Richard at last
remembered what to do; he kissed her —John Updike, Too Far to Go (1979)

Another
nail in his coffin. His. —John Updike, Rabbit is Rich (1981)

So the
rumors of the days when they were solid among us, gorgeous and doing evil, have
flavored the name of the town in the mouths of others, and for those of us who
live here have left something oblong and invisible and exciting we do not
understand. We meet it turning the corner where Hemlock meets Oak; it is there
when we walk the beach in off-season and the Atlantic in its blackness mirrors
the dense packed gray of the clouds: a scandal, life like smoke rising twisted
into legend. —John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick (1984)

“Why
would you do a ridiculous thing like that?”
“Oh—”
She appraised me with her pale green eyes. Whatever emotions had washed through
her had left an amused glint, a hint or seed. In her gorgeous rounded woman’s
voice she pronounced smilingly, “To annoy you.” —John Updike, Roger’s Version
(1986)

Comfortably, Caroline, now entirely herself, one person at last, stared into the
fire and thought of all the souls that she had known and if they were indeed
abroad tonight, they would be all fire and air, light and shadow so fixed upon
her memory that she might, if she chose, transfer them to strips of film that
the whole world could then forever imagine until reel’s end. —Gore Vidal,
Hollywood (1990)

But I knew that Catherine had kissed me because she trusted me, and that made me
happy then but now I am sad because by the time my eyes close each night I
suspect that as usual I have been fooling myself, that she, too, is in her
grave. —William T. Vollmann, You Bright and Risen Angels (1987)

If I
were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would
climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a
pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that
makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back,
grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who. —Kurt Vonnegut,
Cat’s Cradle (1963)

Matter
of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt. —Alice Walker, The Color
Purple (1982)

“You can
trust me, “ R.V. says, watching her hand. “I’m a man of my
—David
Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

And when
he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and
it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out. —David Foster
Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)

We shall
come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch young people on the tennis
courts by the clump of mimosas and walk down the beach by the bay, where the
diving floats lift gently in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the
needles thick on the ground will deaden the footfall so that we shall move among
the trees as soundlessly as smoke. But that will be a long time from now, and
soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world,
out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time. —Robert Penn
Warren, All the King’s Men (1946)

The gun
inside the package exploded and Miss Lonelyhearts fell, dragging the cripple
with him. They both rolled part of the way down the stairs. —Nathanael West,
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

For some
reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he
could. —Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)

All his
dithers, his fumbles, his loving, wished away by a bold, heroic thumbprint from
his last adieu, which he makes with his fist held aloft, the thumb upright.
—Paul West, Rat Man of Paris (1986)

And
then, as if heeding the first mesmeric hint of a direction given, he walks back
alone, unsteady but tranquil, toward the bed he was conceived in, waiting, if
not for doom to crack, at least for the undernourished scurry of its tiny bell.
—Paul West, The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests (1988)

“And I
say, if she’d ha’ died, Ethan might ha’ lived; and the way they are now, I don’t
see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes
down in the graveyard; ‘cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women
have got to hold their tongues.” —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

He knelt
by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the
silence there passed between them the word which made all clear. —Edith Wharton,
The House of Mirth (1905)

“Nothin’.” —Curtis White, Memories of my Father Watching TV (1998)

What
doesn’t leave, though, is this beautiful little feeling about a dog, a boat, a
sunset, and a superb sense of forgiveness. —Curtis White, Requiem (2001)

After
all… —Curtis White, America’s Magic Mountain (2004)

It is
not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
Charlotte was both. —E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web (1952)

But the
sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.
—E.B.
White, Stuart Little (1934)

So that,
in the end, there was no end. —Patrick White, The Tree of Man (1955)

It will
come. She is never wrong. It’s her intuition. —Colson Whitehead, The
Intuitionist (1999)

Never
again. Never again.He turns to face whatever it is rumbling over the stones of Independence Square.
—John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (1990)

He was
withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined
the rings that they recognized who it was. —Oscar Wilde, Picture of Doran
Gray (1890)

The
brave, eternal angle of her hip as she stands, in a light dress, melts his heart
and he holds out his arms to her. —Thomas Williams, The Hair of Harold Roux
(1974)

The
fingers loosened, and the book they had held moved slowly and then swiftly
across the still body and fell into the silence of the room. —John Williams,
Stoner (1988)

“Bones,”
Broadstreet says. —Eric Miles Williamson, Two-Up (2006)

The
river runs from one country to another without stopping. And even the most solid
of things and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only
hand-shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light. —Jeanette Winterson,
Sexing the Cherry (1989)

Yolanda
says to say hello. —William S. Wilson, Birthplace (1982)

“—Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of
the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.” —Thomas Wolfe,
You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)

“I will
come,” said Peter,” but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? What is
this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this
extraordinary excitement?
It is
Clarissa, he said.
For
there she was.
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Yes, she
thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.
—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

He heard
the ring of steel against steel as a far door clanged shut. —Richard Wright,
Native Son (1940)

She
rubbed at her hard belly with a mystic’s innocent faith, utterly certain after
all that even as the planet tilted into darkness there was ripening beneath the
caresses of her gypsy fingers a globe of skin swimming with colors of
astonishing beauty never quite seen before in these particular combinations,
colors the future would need to fill in between the lines, whether on this world
or on out to the stars. —Stephen Wright, M31: A Family Romance (1988)

There
was only the Viewer, slumped forever in his sour seat, the bald shells of his
eyes boiling in pictures, a biblical flood of them, all saturated tones and deep
focus, not one life-size, and the hands applauding, always applauding, palms
abraded to an open fretwork of gristle and bone, the ruined teeth fixed in a
yellowy smile that will not diminish, that will not fade, he’s happy, he’s being
entertained. —Stephen Wright, Going Native (1994)